Museums

The Musée Vaudois de la Vigne et du Vin (Vine and Wine Museum) is housed in the impressive Château d'Aigle. Almost 2,000 years of wine-producing history and cultural traditions is displayed and illustrated, in addition to information about jobs in the wine-producing industry.

History and development of agriculture in Switzerland.

Thanks to the bequest by John A. Brown, a descendent of Sidney und Jenny Brown-Sulzer who died in 1987, Villa Langmatt was made accessible to the public as an Impressionist art and home decor museum. The Villa, built in 1900/01 by the architects Moser and Curjel, is home to a gallery with paintings by important French Impressionists and their forerunners.

The architect Mario Botta designed the Museum Jean Tinguely. It is devoted to the life and work of this major sculptor in iron.

The Collection Beyeler became a public museum - designed by the architect Renzo Piano - with the opening of the Beyeler Foundation. This collection can now be viewed in its own museum.

Basel is the home of Switzerland's largest ethnological and folk art collections. The museum is particularly rich in exhibits from the South Seas and from Indonesia.

The Basel Museum of Ancient Art is the only Swiss museum devoted exclusively to Classical Antiquity. It contains Greek, Etruscan and Roman works, predominantly from the period 1000 B.C.

A tour of the Natural History Museum is like an expedition into the remotest corners of our planet where the most beautiful minerals originate, or into the distant past when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Natural objects - the largest as well as the smallest - are there to be discovered, inspected and contemplated. A memorable experience.

The emphasis of the "Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel" is on Upper Rheinish and Flemish paintings and drawing from 1400 to 1600 and on 19th and 20th century art.

Largest diorama exhibit in Europe: 220 showcases depicting native and exotic birds and mammals in their natural habitat. The famous "Barry", the Saint Bernard dog.

The only museum dedicated to the Swiss Alps introduces the visitors to cultural and natural pecularities of the Alpine world. The journey of discovery into the past and present of the Swiss Alps and their cultural and natural peculiarities is accompanied by videos, commented slides, multivision, info-stations, representations, and impressive originals.

The Swiss Open-Air Museum at Ballenberg shows Switzerland as it used to be.

The Museum will be closed until November 2008 for renovation work.

Visit the Gruyere Museum and discover local traditional ways and customs, and the treasured heritage of the area: poyas, sculpted spoons, wardrobes and costumes are displayed in a modern setting.

This museum contains the most comprehensive collection of historical and artistic documents, accounts and miscellany spanning six centuries relating to the Swiss patriot, William Tell.

In the Frog Museum, you will find something that is truly one of a kind: a collection of 108 stuffed frogs arranged in scenes portraying everyday life in the 19th-century.

The exhibitions in an area of 7,000 square metres allow you to see fabulous archaeological, fine art and applied art treasures. The archaeological section gives you the chance to immerse yourself in local and regional prehistory, Egyptian and Near Eastern antiquity and Etruscan, Greek and Roman civilizations.

The Natural History Museum is one of the most modern in Europe. Along the two kilometers of corridors over four floors, you will encounter 3,500 mammals, birds, vertebrates, invertebrates and numerous stuffed specimens of the regional, exotic and marine wildlife.

Whether through sculptures, masks, jewels, ritual objects, cloth and all types of ornaments, or through forms, styles and materials, so-called primitive man has always gone in search of beauty and the expression of it.

More than 10 centuries' worth of Chinese and Japanese art are displayed in the Baur Collections, a marvellous voyage through Eastern civilizations. Presented with impeccable sobriety and elegance, the multitude of pieces assembled by Alfred Baur is of exceptional quality.

The Ethnography Museum, one of the most important and diverse collections in Switzerland, displays 60,000 objects, 50,000 photos, 20,000 books and thousands of documents.

The Ariana Museum houses one of the richest and most beautiful ceramic and glass collections in Europe.

This international award-winning museum offers a rich variety of insights into castle life over the last 800 years.

The BAUD Museum is a paradise for lovers of mechanical musical instruments. The unique collection was created by a family of enthusiasts whose passion has also been their craft and profession for three generations. 55 pieces are displayed, among them are pianos, fairground organs, music boxes and other mechanical instruments.

The Elysée Museum, a magnificent late-18th century villa with terraced gardens offering a superb view of Lake Geneva and the French Alps, has been completely dedicated to photography since 1985.

Come and discover the Olympic Museum, where you will be able to relive all the momentous occasions in the Games' history through the exceptional scenes on display and the special effects used to enhance them. The Olympic Museum is the world's largest information centre relating to the Olympic Games.

The Hermitage Foundation is dedicated to temporary Fine Art exhibitions, and is located inside a beautiful 19th century residence surrounded by magnificent parkland that is open to the public.

Not far from Le Locle, a late 18th century manor house is home to a magnificent collection of clocks and watches.

The Foundation is designed to advertise the art of watchmaking in the Vallée de Joux. Visitors can choose to follow a guided tour of the Museum or wander around it alone. Local businesses exhibit samples of watches in their current collections.

The Foundation was built around the remains of the oldest Franco-Swiss temple ever found in Switzerland. The exhibition displays the main archaeological finds from the Martigny excavations, which began in 1976.

Baker Street 221 b: The carefully reconstructed room in which Sherlock worked and lived can be visited in the Sherlock Holmes Museum.

Swissminiatur shows you the most picturesque features of Switzerland - towns, villages, monuments, transportation, all at a scale of 1:25.

Picturesque Oberhofen Castle is situated on the shores of Lake Thun. A branch of Bern's Historical Museum, it houses today an important exhibition of Bernese living.

The Château de Prangins was built in the 18th century by Louis Guiguer, a Swiss banker living in Paris, and has hosted illustrious guests from Voltaire to Joseph Bonaparte.

The Abegg Foundation is an institute of art history which devotes its research to early textiles and applied art.

The charming medieval town of Romont is perched on a hill in Fribourg. The castle there houses its own Stained Glass Window Museum, which is one of a kind in Switzerland.

Sainte-Croix has been known as the world capital for music boxes for over a century. The machines, which range from Vaucanson styles to contemporary designers, present a fantastic and poetic spectacle.

An important museum of contemporary art, the "Hallen für Neue Kunst", has found an attractive home in a former textile factory.

The Forum of Swiss History shows the daily life of our ancestors between 1300 and 1800.

In the idyllic town of Seewen in Solothurn, the Museum of Musical Automatons maintains Dr. Heinrich Weiss-Stauffacher's large and important collection composed of nearly 400 mechanical instruments and orchestrions. The museum which opened in a new building in 2000 is wheelchair accessible.

Historical embroideries from the 14th to the 20th century; lace from important European lace centers from the 15th to 20th century.

Thun's fascinating History Museum is located in a unique castle tower which was built by Berchtold V of Zähringen in 1195. Perched high above the town, it provides a good general picture of the region's cultural development during more than 2000 years.

Human beings must eat to live - a fact so evident it tends to hide the really complex matter of feeding a specific village, city, region or country in a given era. The Food Museum presents the different stages of the path travelled by food as it moves from the producer to the consumer.

The Technorama is not just an exhibition of natural science, technology, technoart and phenomena.

The Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten presents about 600 paintings of German, Swiss and Austrian artists from the 18th to the 20th century. Until 1 August 2010 the two Oskar Reinhart collections are to be merged temporarily. The renovation of the Villa Am Römerholz provides a unique opportunity to see an important selection of its world-famous paintings by old masters and French Impressionists at the Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten in Winterthur, set here in an exciting dialogue with part of Reinhart’s collection of paintings by German and Swiss painters.

The "Maison d'Ailleurs" (House of Elsewhere) is a Science Fiction, Utopia and Otherworldly Travel Museum. It is the only one of its kind in the whole world and displays several truly exceptional collections and a total of 40,000 pieces.

The E.G. Bührle Collection is one of the most prestigious of private art collections. It comprises medieval wood carvings and paintings by the old masters, but above all works by French artists of the 19th and 20th century.

Besides the permanent collection, the Kunsthaus presents changing exhibits which make the museum one of Switzerland's leading exhibition centers.

The "Green Hill", the enchanting Rieter Park, and its historic mansions form a unique backdrop for the presentation of the art of Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania.

The collection of the Bern Museum of Art comprises works from seven centuries. More than 3,000 paintings and sculptures as well as 48,000 works on paper are on display in the art museum.

The only museum in Switzerland dedicated exclusively to communication in its entire bandwidth, from body language and culture dialogue to the exchange of information using old and new media.

With approximately 4,000 pictures by Paul Klee, the famous painter, the new Zentrum Paul Klee is the largest collection of this kind worldwide.

In this, the most comprehensive transport museum in Europe, an experience-oriented show unfolds the story of the development of all forms of traffic and communication.

French paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries
are exhibited in the authentic ambience created by the museum-architects Rittmeyer & Furrer in the former private villa of the collectors Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser-Bühler.

Fotomuseum Winterthur (Photo Museum Winterthur) The Photo Museum Winterthur is the only museum of photography in the German speaking part of Switzerland. It is located in a converted factory. Photography in all its variety is presented in changing exhibitions, lectures and publications. It is a place for photography as an art form and a visual documentation of reality. Fotostiftung Schweiz (Photo Foundation Switzerland) The Fotostiftung Schweiz (Swiss Foundation for Photography) was founded in 1971 and is committed to the preservation, discovery and referral of photographic work. It takes care of an archive and a collection, which to date comprises more than 30 bequests and approximately 30,000 original prints of outstanding photographers.

Located in the heart of Zürich, the Swiss National Museum houses Switzerland’s largest collection on cultural history. The over 100-year-old building is reminiscent of a fairytale castle. On 1st August 2009, two new permanent exhibitions opened. Entitled “History of Switzerland” and “Collections Gallery,” they will offer a fascinating insight into Swiss history from its origins to the 20th century.